Celeste devs cancel lush platformer Earthblade to focus on smaller-scale projects

"A huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure"

Celeste and Towerfall creators Extremely OK Games have announced the cancellation of their pixelart exploration platformer Earthblade, in what studio director Maddy Thorson calls a "huge, heartbreaking, and yet relieving failure". The decision to call it quits follows a bust-up within the development team, though this isn't, apparently, why they pulled the plug. Thorson and programmer Noel Berry have found making something "bigger and better" than Celeste exhausting, and have decided to work on smaller projects in future.

Extremely OK announced Earthblade back in 2021 with Celeste composer Lena Raine handling the soundtrack. A proper reveal followed in 2022 with a smidgeon of plot information: the game would have seen you playing a "child of Fate", exploring a ruined planet. In March last year, Thorson blogged about development difficulties but assured readers that the team were making progress. That brings us to today. It sounds like last year has been more complicated than she originally divulged.

Posting on Extremely OK's website, Thorson writes that a "fracture" formed last year between herself and Berry and co-founder Pedro Medeiros, who was Earthblade's art director and pixel/UI artist for Celeste and Towerfall.

"The conflict centered around a disagreement about the IP rights of Celeste, which we won't be detailing publicly - this was obviously a very difficult and heartbreaking process," she explains. "We eventually reached a resolution, but both parties also agreed in the end that we should go our separate ways. Pedro is now working on his game Neverway, which you should check out - we've played it and it's very promising."

Pedro's departure prompted Berry and Thorson to think hard about the status of Earthblade as a whole. "The project had a lot going for it but, frustratingly, it was also not as far along as one would expect after such a protracted development process," Thorson continues. "I do believe that if we soldiered on despite it all, that Earthblade could still be a great game.

"But would it be worth the pain? Noel and I also began to reflect on how the game has felt for us to work on day-to-day, and realized that it has been a struggle for a long time. Sure, working on one project for so long is bound to become a slog, but this feels like a deeper problem. Celeste's success applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting."

Thorson is careful to spell out that Medeiros is not to blame for all this - his leaving simply created "the clarity to see that we have lost our way". She adds that "if you were excited about Earthblade and angry about its cancelling, Pedro and the Neverway team aren't the enemy and anyone who treats them as such isn't welcome in any EXOK community."

As part of the cancellation, Thorson and Berry have parted ways with the other members of the Earthblade team - that's Amora, Kyle Pulver, Chevy Ray, Raine and sound design company Power-Up Audio - though they hope to collaborate with them again.

"Noel & I now want to take all of the (many!) lessons we've learned from Earthblade, wipe the slate clean, and refocus ourselves back to smaller-scale projects," Thorson goes on. "We're prototyping again and exploring at our own pace, and trying to rediscover game development in a manner closer to how we approached it at Celeste's or TowerFall's inception."

She concludes that "scaling the core team up post-Celeste has ultimately been a failure, and that's okay. We gave it all we've got, and life goes on. We are happy to return to our roots and reclaim some joy in our creative process, and see where that takes us."

I confess, I still haven't found time to play the magnificent-sounding Celeste, but the same-screen archery frenzy of Towerfall was an office lunchbreak favourite when I worked at Future London. We'd gather round a monitor and mostly fall victim to our own arrows while hooting like baby elephants. Clearly the people who made that game are geniuses. I wish Extremely OK and the departing Earthblade team members better luck with their future creations.